The Los Angeles Times on the actor’s sliding campaign. As I suspected, Thompson’s candidacy is this year’s Wes Clark…and an object lesson for future latecomers: It’s hard to jump full-speed into a presidential campaign, even an interminable one…and impossible if you’re lazy. The early months of a campaign are crucial for fund-raising, yes, but also for getting your stump act together–and for figuring out which of your positions are suicidal within your party. In Thompson’s case, his honorable and intellectually defensible position that abortion should be a matter of (local) legislative action rather than federal judicial action is a killer with the evangelical sorts who were sorta, kinda hoping for a Cindarella to fit into the glass slipper of their restrictive ideology. No deal with Thompson.
In any case, who’d be surprised if this guy slipped out of the GOP top tier?
Update: Silly me. It appears that National Right-to-Life will endorse Thompson on Friday. But then, this is the year that moral relativism has overtaken the GOP’s interest groups. File under: Robertson endorses Giuliani